Article 49928 of comp.sys.cbm: Xref: undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca comp.sys.cbm:49928 Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Path: undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca!csbruce From: csbruce@ccnga.uwaterloo.ca (Craig Bruce) Subject: Re: can you identify these symptoms? Sender: news@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca (news spool owner) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 23:01:14 GMT References: <9602210238.AA000ii@cosine.demon.co.uk> Nntp-Posting-Host: ccnga.uwaterloo.ca Organization: University of Waterloo, Canada (eh!) In article <9602210238.AA000ii@cosine.demon.co.uk>, Jason wrote: >I was told once that the term "bug" as regards software originally referred >to exactly that!! When computers were aircraft-hanger sized a well place >cockroach could *really* screw the RAM up! This comes from the entry in the New Hacker's Dictionary for "bug": Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glich in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated "bug" in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped to it, is recorded in the _Annals of the History of Computing_, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. Keep on Hackin'! -Craig Bruce csbruce@ccnga.uwaterloo.ca "Bruce's First Law of Debugging: About half of the time, it's the assertion itself that's wrong."